ESPN Free With Virgin XL

[Leggett]

still a damn sight better than most of the rest of the GB team...

[The Grim Reaper]

Up until 6 months ago I was paying BT £24.99 a month just for BB and that was on top of their phone line rental charges as well at £11 a month. Although the BB worked well and I dont ever recall losing connection, my speed never seemed to get past 4-5 Mbit even though i was paying for the 8Mb tier.

Now on Virgin, £30 a month, 10mb BB (usually sits around 8.5/9.5Mb) and that includes phone line rental and a cable tv box with the FTA channels on. *



*Swap this box for a Eurovox and you can get all the channels. So a friend tells me

[Scot Munroe]

shame the espn classic does not come with the package. might have to purchase it.

[jonny72]

shame the espn classic does not come with the package. might have to purchase it.

ESPN Classic comes with Virgin TV XL - all the ESPN channels do. Don't see the point of just subscribing to ESPN if you're on a different TV package, you might as well pay the few quid extra to get everything.

[Leggett]

That's what I've done, signed up for the XL package. The missus is happy, she gets national geographic now.

To be honest tho, I've only really got espn for the ice hockey.

[carbonwhite]

I've had NTL/Virgin in the past and will never go back to it. My Parents have got Virgin and i find it incredibly slow, it freezes alot and on quite a few occasions it doesn't even show what's on and what's coming up next.

The ESPN package doesn't interest me as it will probably show alot of shit games just like Setanta did.

Sky+/hd all the way.

when the listings dont come up all ya gotta do is restart it and it only does that in the mornings

[Spy]

Yeah its strange that Virgins broadband is the fastest yet scrolling through the screens to choose on demand programmes takes forever. 

[otanswell]

It blows everyone else out of the water - you actually get the speed they advertise all the time.

absolute bollocks. i have 50 mb broadband, most days i fire up youtube, by the time ive made a cup of coffee, had a wank and curled one out im still waiting for the clip to load.

i have v+ downstairs, a box upstairs, and a (chipped) box in my daughters room, sky sports, sky moves etc (the vip package) and it costs my 75 quid a month with internet and phoneline.
tell them you'll fuck off to sky and you'll end up getting discounted to fuck

[Samdy Gray]

absolute bollocks. i have 50 mb broadband, most days i fire up youtube, by the time ive made a cup of coffee, had a wank and curled one out im still waiting for the clip to load.

That'll either be due to Youtube's servers or your PC, not the connection. If you've got 50mb then you must be on cable, which means your line is fixed speed and not adaptive like ADSL.

[jonny72]

That'll either be due to Youtube's servers or your PC, not the connection. If you've got 50mb then you must be on cable, which means your line is fixed speed and not adaptive like ADSL.

Or there is a fault on the line.

Or your internal network can't support the 50Mb speed.

[Spy]

That'll either be due to Youtube's servers or your PC, not the connection. If you've got 50mb then you must be on cable, which means your line is fixed speed and not adaptive like ADSL.

What you seem to be saying is everyone on XL broadband has a 50mb speed coming into their house and if they get any less than that its due to their router or network cable??? Thats just not true. The speeds with virgin are still advertised as up to whatever mb and according to that recent broadband speed survey whilst virgin was by far the fastest ISP due to their use of cables but the speeds were still well below advertised max speeds for most users.

I assume you're not with virgin on the XL package. If so are you getting 50mb download speeds???!

[flammableBen]

50Mbit != 50Mbyte.

Just thought we'd stop any confusion there.

[pauld]

That'll either be due to Youtube's servers or your PC, not the connection. If you've got 50mb then you must be on cable, which means your line is fixed speed and not adaptive like ADSL.

Hmmm, unless the technology's changed (which it may have done) since I used to work for Cable Internet (forerunner of blueyonder), that's not necessarily true. This was over 10 years ago, mind, so it may have changed since then, but back then it was a fixed speed into a block of addresses not an individual address. IIRC there was a line from the cable provider into a "head unit" (I think) which provided cable TV/internet for several addresses which then shared the bandwidth downstream from there. Usually there would be enough bandwidth into each head unit that most of the time you wouldn't be in contention with your neighbours so you would get the "up to" speed but if everyone on your head unit (or whatever it's actually called) was maxing out the connection, then you'd get a lower avg speed across that head unit thingy. Like I say, may have changed since then, maybe now they do individual lines to individual addresses but back then that was how CI worked and NTL (who are now Virgin).

But whatever else may have changed in the 10 years+ since I worked in the industry, one thing hasn't - I still can't get cable and from what I can tell am not likely to be able to before they start live coverage of the All-Satanic Beelzebub Ice Championships (or I move house)

[Samdy Gray]

I think what PaulD said is still the same in practice, but if you buy cable broadband at an advertised speed then you should be receiving there or thereabouts that speed. They say "up to" because it's dependent on your own equipment and wiring and they also have traffic shaping policies.

If you've signed up to 50mb and aren't getting anywhere near that then you really should raise a support call.

[Spy]

I'm on that package and I don't get speeds that fast. Our router does need replacing but even then I don't think we'd be getting that speed. I suspect not many people do.